Is anyone else slightly feeling desensitized to the amounts of money that governments are suddenly spending or companies are hemorrhaging? Obama wants to spend 800 billion which comes after Bush already poured 700 billion last year, Canada will likely announce something like 64 billion over the next two years, firms like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, HSBC have lost numbers which are followed by the word billion.

Frankly I haven’t a clue how much a billion really looks like. That’s 10 million $100 bills. I’m thinking that would take a little more than a carefully camouflaged briefcase. Assuming that each $100 bill weighs 1 gram that would be 10,000 kg using $100 bills. That would be one hell of a mattress. In the US an average car weighs 2000 kg, so it would be the equivalent of 5 cars. Cool!

Okay, so it’s not exactly the kind of amount you decide to just take to the shop with you.

You know I can’t even imagine spending a billion dollars, let alone misplacing a billion dollars (which makes you really wonder about these so-called expert brokers and bankers on Wall Street, Bay Street and elsewhere). If you assume $20 for every meal and three meals a day, 1 billion dollars would buy you 3 meals a day for 45,660 years or the full lifetimes of 750 people. Wow. To be honest for most of December I was living in Ecuador where I was spending $3 a meal… that would mean 304,414 years of meals.

So let’s see, the United States and Canada will have spent a total of almost 1500 billion dollars, that’s 1.5 trillion dollars (wait a few years, we’ll just replace  billion with trillion). Okay let’s do that in food… 1.5 trillion using $9 a day for food in Ecuador, well, that is the amount of money to feed 7.5 million people for 60 years.

Right. So a billion dollars is a *lot* of money. 1.5 trillion is a humongous amount of money.

What’s the point? The point is that really, I’m fundamentally at a loss as to whether the entire world has gone mad or not. It seems pretty obvious at this point that people are just making up numbers and no one actually has any clue as to a) what those numbers actually mean any more and b) where all the money went in the first place?

I know, I know, the money no longer exists because the stuff that was supposed to be worth something is worth a whole lot less.

Does anyone just want to yell “STOP” and ask people to just reset the whole system? The numbers just stop making sense.

In the week that President Obama stood before his nation and proclaimed that “we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America” as this was the “price and the promise of citizenship”, Microsoft proves that corporate America is beyond that hard-won citizenship, that it can act as it wants with no thought to solving the problems of the world.

Today Microsoft announced that this past quarter it had made profits of 4.17 billion dollars on quarterly revenues of 16.63 billion dollars. This in a company that employs 94,000 people and has 20 billion dollars in the bank.

Let me put that into a bit of perspective. This quarter Microsoft accounted for the equivalent of the entire GDP of Niger according to the 2007 listing on Wikipedia. It had revenues which equaled the GDP of countries like Tanzania and Bahrain and if you think about it that would be close to its yearly profits.

However, this is far from enough for the giant, rich company. It wants to lay-off 5,000 workers, because the times are tough.

Times are tough? The company earned 4.17 billion dollars as profit. This is not a company that lost money, this is a company that made 4 billion dollars in profit. Is this how corporate America reacts to beginning the remaking of America? Is this the way to show the price of citizenship? That it made 0.5 billion dollars less in profit is unfortunate, but is that really a reason to announce lay-offs?

Microsoft, let me tell you about when “times are tough”. When your country went deep into a depression that saw millions out of work, many starving and the prairies turn into a dust bowl, those are tough times. When people have to line up for food and not be able to feed their children, those are tough times. These are the hardships that created your country, these are the hardships that gave you the ability to own and run your company.

I work for Sun Microsystems, I know we’re laying off people. But at least we are making a loss, there may be some justification to it. Microsoft, look at yourselves: your company is making a profit, you are one of the great engines of the North American economy. Your inability to have an imagination, to heed the words of your newly elected president, to try to remake what it means to be corporate America is a shame upon all of corporate America.

Admit the fact that announcing layoffs is a way to appease the greed and sensibility of Wall Street.

Putting people out of work when you can afford to keep them and to try harder to create new markets, new technologies, new avenues for growth, that would be an answer to get us all out of this problem. Instead you successfully spread fear, doubt and fuel an even worse disaster.

For shame Microsoft, for shame.